For a star who’s been publicly unlucky in love, Selena Gomez has a surprisingly rich catalog of love songs. There’s the title track of her 2015 album, Revival, whose subject basks in the romantic glow of self-discovery. Her biggest hit to date is a profession of tenderness for a woman rising from the ashes of heartbreak. You see what I’m getting at: Gomez has historically been the object of her own affection. And while so-called “empowerment pop” always runs the risk of corniness, the details of Gomez’s biography have made hers feel earned. Resilient in the face of vicious scrutiny of her relationships and health struggles, Gomez became both a credible mirror to her listeners’ pain and a beacon for their shot at redemption. While her peers spend their days furiously plotting performances of vulnerability, Gomez may be the most convincingly down-to-earth pop star we have.
All of that transformative, hard-won self-love has unlocked a new era for Gomez; these days, her love songs have a different object. I Said I Love You First is her seventh studio album and first full-length collaboration with Benny Blanco, to whom she is recently engaged. Blanco and Gomez’s professional relationship extends back at least a decade, to when he co-wrote and produced some of the more radio-oriented singles on Revival. He may lack his fiancée’s seismic celebrity, but Blanco’s fingerprints are all over modern-day pop: A former Dr. Luke protégé, he’s behind No. 1 hits by the likes of Katy Perry, Maroon 5, and Justin Bieber. Even so, such behind-the-scenes players rarely get co-billing with A-list singers. Here, the gesture clearly serves the album’s meta-narrative: Selena and Benny are in love, and their love is a meeting of musical minds. Mazel tov to the happy couple.
Absent this meta-narrative, I Said I Love You First is quite scattershot, an odd collection of songs that sound like other songs, incongruous spoken interludes, and one random reggaeton track (“I Can’t Get Enough”) first released in 2019. In interviews, Blanco and Gomez underscored the ease with which the album came together. They worked on it at home, in bed, they said; in light of the results, this has had the unfortunate effect of making me more sympathetic to return-to-office mandates. The record opens with Gomez speaking about growing up and embracing change, in a clip lifted from a farewell address to the cast of her Disney Channel show Wizards of Waverly Place, then launches into a lament for her youth. It ends with a twinkly little paean about the fragile nature of love. In between, the loosest outline of a narrative arc traces the fading of one relationship into another.
Considering her plethora of other jobs—actress, professional home cook, elder comic whisperer, beauty mogul—it’s easy to forget that Gomez has been releasing music for the better part of two decades. A product of the Disney ecosystem in the era of Miley and Demi, her initial entry seemed more a matter of professional obligation than passion. Lacking a distinct musical point of view—or, at least, the creative freedom to realize one—she meandered from spunky yet polished pop-rock with erstwhile “band” the Scene in the late aughts to slick, maximalist dance-pop in the early 2010s. With Revival, things finally started to jell. Gomez stopped stretching her slight voice to dimensions it couldn’t fill and embraced ASMR pop, whisper-singing over skeletal production. The recipe yielded some of the best songs of her career.
Now, as then, Lana Del Rey looms large in Gomez’s music. (In a recent interview, Blanco called Gomez “the original sad girl”—Lana erasure!) At times, that inspiration flies dangerously close to pastiche: Hear how Gomez dribbles her words like syrup over the backbeat of “You Said You Were Sorry,” which could pass for a Honeymoon B-side. On “How Does It Feel to Be Forgotten,” her singing is heavy-lidded and the lyrics deliciously bitchy, while Blanco’s production cleans up Dan Auerbach’s from Ultraviolence. Both songs are laden with classic Lana signifiers: the Pacific Coast Highway, lipstick, diamonds. The horny, featherweight trap of “Cowboy,” too, sounds familiar. It’s a smooth ride with satin reins until its jarring outro, where GloRilla shows up, uncredited, to deliver a bawdy account of her bedroom prowess—an uncomfortable sort of racialized ventriloquism through which Gomez signposts her own sexuality. (Lana is no stranger to this kind of thing.)
Gomez is an actress, and Lana is just one of her characters. When collaborators appear, Gomez doesn’t tease out new sounds and ideas with them but borrows their aesthetics wholesale. Charli XCX and 100 gecs’ Dylan Brady help her throw an all-night rager on “Bluest Flame,” bringing the vocal filters and club beats from BRAT but not enough uppers to make it convincing. “Ojos Tristes,” written and produced with dream-pop band the Marías, is like a fraternal twin to their song “No One Noticed” and cribs heavily from a third source—a 1981 song by the British-Spanish singer Jeanette. Much of this music is perfectly serviceable; I’d just rather listen to the originals.
“Call Me When You Break Up,” the album’s Gracie Abrams–featuring second single, is more enticing—brisk and bubbly, with curious lyrics that cascade like falling bombs in Kaboom!. (It is also the only song here on which Julia Michaels—a common denominator in Gomez’s best and most idiosyncratic work—is credited.) The song dips into themes of jealousy and regret, which surface with surprising frequency on an album ostensibly about devotion. On “Younger and Hotter Than Me,” Gomez achingly sizes herself up against a former flame’s new girlfriend. “Don’t Take It Personally” addresses a partner’s ex, kindly—if somewhat condescending—wishing her the best. This is where I Said I Love You First gets most interesting: When Gomez sings not about a romantic partner, but about his romantic partners, past and present, hinting at the messy webs that entangle even the most successful relationships.
As for the relationship in question: For the purposes of this record, it’s mostly sublimated into sex, nowhere more conspicuously than on “Sunset Blvd.” There’s no need to unpack why the juvenile bait-and-switch of “I can’t wait to hold that big, big, hard…heart” is embarrassing. It’s even worse that Gomez’s delivery for the rest of the song is joyless, suggesting immediate retreat from a joke she knew wouldn’t land. Really, there’s minimal evidence of joy anywhere on I Said I Love You First, despite its heart-eyed packaging. But rather than an indication of romantic strife, this subdued quality is a useful reminder of the limits of the authenticity paradigm in pop: An artist’s personal life, their music, and how they present each constitute separate circles of a Venn diagram. Stars can entertain us, they can mirror us, but they can never be known to us, really. And yet: In a way, Gomez has never seemed more relatable—to those of us who have phoned it in at work because we were busy being dumb in love.
